10/13/2010 5:57:36 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Researchers who follow data on internet and phone connectivity know how spotty comparable international data is. For households, this is a fact, and when we move into the connectivity of businesses across countries, the data just doesn't exist. So, I was curious today when a new publication from European Commission came out covering "
E-communications" across the EU at the end of 2009. While I was disappointed to not see anything in their survey about how the households were using electronic communications to facilitate business (think of all the reports of people running small Internet businesses on the side), I was struck by one measure I found in the report - "calling over the Internet."
So when measuring if anyone in the household used their computer to make a phone call, the authors found surprisingly little change since 2008 but a lot of heterogeneity across countries. Lithuania and Latvia came in at the top, with more than 60 percent of households reporting these activities while Portugal and Spain came in at the bottom around 10 percent.
As someone who has relied on a digital phone to work for the last six years and because I have had many interactions with companies attempting to globalize which were relying on boundary-less communications like Skype, I think there is something in these statistics worth more of a look. At the least, these statistics seem to point to another indicator of the extent to which a particular country is internationalized.